You can train yourself in maintaining eye contact to appear more persuasive. Spend some time with your mirror and people will find your arguments much more convincing in the future.

While you're there, also train yourself to be able to maintain an unblinking stare. If persuation is not what you need and intimidation is the card you need in your hand, maintaining a direct eye contact without blinking for minutes on end is unnerving for anyone having to take your glare.

In some cultures, looking someone in the eye is a challenge, in others, its a sign of respect. I learned that in my time working in a community law office and was working with some First Nations people.

I would be interested to know the ages of participants in this study. Perhaps the power of eye contact has faded for those who grew up on the internet. This is probably true for society in general as we become more reliant on remote communication.

Where I grew up in Eastern Europe, not looking people in the eye was a serious problem. In the States, where I live now, things are a bit different. This is obviously cultural, and undergraduates used in this study belong to their own, possibly very narrow, culture. Making this an extremely limited finding in terms of universality.

You can train yourself in maintaining eye contact to appear more persuasive. Spend some time with your mirror and people will find your arguments much more convincing in the future.

While you're there, also train yourself to be able to maintain an unblinking stare. If persuation is not what you need and intimidation is the card you need in your hand, maintaining a direct eye contact without blinking for minutes on end is unnerving for anyone having to take your glare.

Indeed; I specifically taught my martial arts students "the 1,000 yard stare" from day 1.

Backing someone down with an intimidating look is always better than going physical plus if the other person IS comitted to violence, looking at the eyes and upper frame will allow you to see their initial move.

In more civilized situations, you absolutely can be convincing and 'sincere' with eye contact but I also know it's possible to make the audience go defensive.

I think the key to managing the balancing act is to practice using additional data like body language and tone of voice. Yeah, we all do that in some fashion every day but people who are more skilled make usually for better speakers, salespeople, leaders, etc.

How I thought this goes is that the person who is talking looks away, and the person who is listening looks at the face of the person talking. The more interested in what is being said, the more closely you will look at the person's face and eyes for cues as to sincerity, emotional layers, etc. If you're the one talking and you need to add emphasis, you make eye-contact briefly.

If you look into someone's eyes constantly while talking, it is likely to make the other person uncomfortable. It is like typing in all caps. It prevents them scanning your face properly and it's a domination technique for giving orders.

But in this case, it wasn't such a natural set-up. People who were prevented from looking at eyes in the last scenario might have just missed out on cues or something. Maybe being ordered to constantly look into the speaker's eyes did a kind of unconscious NLP thing on the listeners due to it mimicking suspicious listening or standing up to an attempt at domination. They unconsciously convinced themselves they were suspicious, in other words, by locking down their own gaze movement.

I think direct eye contact is actually pretty taxing cognitively. When we engage in it what ever baser thoughts and emotions we already feel towards the subject or their ideas get amplified and our higher reasoning attenuates. At the extreme ends of the emotional gamut, love and affection come on *much* stronger, as do anger and hate. It's about the most direct and intimate interface one can have with another person barring physical contact.

I don't get how the study proves the conclusion. The conclusion is that, as a speaker, making eye contact when trying to convince someone can be a bonus or a detriment depending on whether or not the listener already agrees or not. However, no one was making eye contact with the listeners here. The listeners were watching videos. There was no live speaker to test making eye contact vs. not making eye contact with the listeners.

What seems to be shown, instead, is "forcing a listener to make eye contact with a speaker can be a bonus or a detriment depending on whether or not they agree with the speaker already." The study doesn't seem to actually investigate the impact of the speaker's behavior.

Meh, as an Aspie I find it a chore to look someone in the eye. And I'm basically indifferent to someone making eye contact with me. I'm much more interested (or not) in what they have to say. You neurotypicals and your "body language". So quaint!

You can train yourself in maintaining eye contact to appear more persuasive. Spend some time with your mirror and people will find your arguments much more convincing in the future.

While you're there, also train yourself to be able to maintain an unblinking stare. If persuation is not what you need and intimidation is the card you need in your hand, maintaining a direct eye contact without blinking for minutes on end is unnerving for anyone having to take your glare.

Indeed; I specifically taught my martial arts students "the 1,000 yard stare" from day 1.

How I thought this goes is that the person who is talking looks away, and the person who is listening looks at the face of the person talking. The more interested in what is being said, the more closely you will look at the person's face and eyes for cues as to sincerity, emotional layers, etc. If you're the one talking and you need to add emphasis, you make eye-contact briefly.

If you look into someone's eyes constantly while talking, it is likely to make the other person uncomfortable. It is like typing in all caps. It prevents them scanning your face properly and it's a domination technique for giving orders.

But in this case, it wasn't such a natural set-up. People who were prevented from looking at eyes in the last scenario might have just missed out on cues or something. Maybe being ordered to constantly look into the speaker's eyes did a kind of unconscious NLP thing on the listeners due to it mimicking suspicious listening or standing up to an attempt at domination. They unconsciously convinced themselves they were suspicious, in other words, by locking down their own gaze movement.

I happen to agree here, people will feel more comfortable if you don´t look directly at them all the time, because most people don´t like to be detected when they watch you. Keeping constant eye look would definitely make them feel uncomfortable and some may even consider it aggressive.

I think this all depends on the type of situation. Watching a group of people while speaking is one thing, making constant eye ball contact very close to someone while talking is another thing. It depends on the context and situation.

For some reason when I look people in the eyes I get distracted by it. I can't visualize what they're saying if they're talking, and can't maintain my train of thought if I'm talking. I tend to glace to ensure we're still on the same page, but I can't do the staring contest style of conversation.

Meh, as an Aspie I find it a chore to look someone in the eye. And I'm basically indifferent to someone making eye contact with me. I'm much more interested (or not) in what they have to say. You neurotypicals and your "body language". So quaint!

Well, body language is an additional level to communication, but since it isn't really standardized anyway (and overgeneralized ideas like the one in the study are practically always of limited use, if any), the spoken word in most cases is more relevant in the end. Individual people have different ways of communicating anyway, so yours is not really outside of the feasible range.

There are many ways of not getting certain aspects of what the other person is trying to express, even for seemingly "normal" people.

Sample size itself is not an issue. Type-1 error rate decreases as both the sample size and and effect size increase, and as the variability between observations decreases. If the sample size was small then that was either because the effect was very large or very reliable (or both). If researchers had expected the effect to be smaller or less reliable then they would have used a larger sample size (1st year students aren't' exactly a rare commodity after all). Researchers routinely select an appropriate sample size in advance for an expected effect size and level of variability by conducting a power analysis. The goal for any scientist is not to use a large sample size but to use an appropriate sample size for the effect being studied. Using a larger sample size than is needed is both pointless and wasteful of resources, and a scientist who does this is bad at their job.

The nature of the sampling population (i.e. uni students) could be regarded as an issue, in that we may not be not justified in generalising beyond it. In cases where it is suspected that this could be an issue the solution is just to replicate the study either using a highly diverse sampling population (e.g. all humans) or using a variety of different sampling populations. However it only makes sense to go to that additional effort and expense once you have obtained a finding of interest using a more readily available sampling population. So with regard to this issue, too, the researchers are doing things the right way.

I was thinking the same thing when I saw the photo...and actually, I've read studies that attractive people (beauty is in the eye, but most people still agree when someone is attractive) tend to be more "believable" than others. In other words, if a beautiful woman is looking me in the eyes, telling me something, I'm more likely to believe it than if my great aunt tilly with warts on her nose is telling me the same thing.

I live in Japan, where too much eye contact is considered....can't think of the right English word for it...overbearing. It's not that people never look each other in the eye here, but it's much briefer and broken up by polite glances somewhere else than straight into the eyes of your conversation partner.

This mirrors, of course, other cultural norms. I'll go back to the States and meet someone for the first time, and they'll ask me a deeply personal question right off the bat, and I'll think "You have no right to ask me that, you stupid American...."

I live in Japan, where too much eye contact is considered....can't think of the right English word for it...overbearing. It's not that people never look each other in the eye here, but it's much briefer and broken up by polite glances somewhere else than straight into the eyes of your conversation partner.

As a third-generation Japanese-American, I wonder whether I picked up some of these behaviors subconsciously from my parents. Despite the fact that my family was very "Americanized" in overall culture, I've noticed that, like many Asian Americans, we tend to use less direct, extended eye contact than most Americans.

Many years ago, I had one supervisor comment that he found my lack of eye contact off-putting. Since then, it's something that I consciously make use of in business conversations (though in reasonable quantities, not in creepy constant stare mode).

Also, I've always been taught to look someone in the eyes when speaking to them as a sign of respect. Though this is something I only do for serious conversations. Or when I'm joking around, it helps to see people's reactions by checking their eyes & mouths.

But if it is a serious conversation like a police interrogation and the person NEVER looks the cop in the eyes, I do think it could be a bad signal. Though I think cops pay more attention to changes from that person's 'normal' amount of eye contact rather than an absolute value.

Where I grew up in Eastern Europe, not looking people in the eye was a serious problem. In the States, where I live now, things are a bit different. This is obviously cultural, and undergraduates used in this study belong to their own, possibly very narrow, culture. Making this an extremely limited finding in terms of universality.

Someone once describe behavioral economics as "the study of what relatively well off American university students will do for money".

I always look at peoples mouth when talking, I've done it since I can remember, I've asked people if they can tell if I'm looking at their mouth and they all say no, I also notice a lot of pretty big budget films when the camera is looking over someones shoulder when they are speaking, and their mouth doesn't line up with the audio, and wonder how this scene actually made it into production.

The best reference for judging the validity of any conclusions on eye contact is WWF (or as it was known "back in the day", Big Time Wrasslin'). With nothing more than a simple gaze, those guys convey the entire gamut of non-verbal, emotion-rich, communication; the full range, all the way from A to B.

In some cultures, looking someone in the eye is a challenge, in others, its a sign of respect. I learned that in my time working in a community law office and was working with some First Nations people.

This, many times over. The cultural differences and interpretations of looking people in the eye, glancing to the side, looking down, etc, are immense.

Eye contact is so cultural that I'm not sure you can even pin an evolutionary aspect on it. Case in point: My best friend's parents adopted two Sudanese refugees when my friend and I were 18. They were 10 and 12 when they came here. One of them told me recently that one of the hardest things for him culturally was eye contact.

When his American dad would correct him or lecture him, he was expected to look him in the eye as a sign of respect and to indicate that he was listening. But when he was in trouble in the Sudan, looking in his father's eyes (or anyone in authority) was considered insolent. Now that he's a grown man he laughs about when he goes to Africa he has to constantly remind himself to not look peopeople in the eye too much, and when he comes back to the US that he needs to start doing it again.